The loneliness of remote work: Older adults most affected by the loss of social networks

MORE THAN FIVE YEARS after the COVID pandemic forced many workers to abandon their offices and work remotely, a hidden cost is emerging: loneliness.

The impact falls heaviest on those oldest. Studies are finding loneliness afflicts far more people over age 55 who are working remotely, compared to their younger coworkers. One survey found older employees were nearly twice as likely as workers aged 16 to 24 to say they felt the social loss of remote working.

“I think it breeds loneliness, disconnection,” said Jeannine Vaughan, a communications strategist in San Francisco’s Potrero Hill district who began working from home before the pandemic started. Before that, she owned an ad agency filled with in-person staff that she said ran on “real camaraderie.”

With the rise in remote working, she said, building teamwork and a sense of workplace community is much harder. “Work is not the same,” she said.

People of all ages, whether working from home or not, are showing higher rates of loneliness and isolation in recent years. The move to work from home caused by the pandemic intensified the trend.

But it carries extra weight for aging people who are already more vulnerable to health issues, financial challenges and dwindling social networks.

At first, the rush to work from home at the start of the pandemic gave some people giddy daydreams of turning their WFH mandate into a license to work from sunny exotic locales. That soon faded, and the reality of spending all day in Zoom meetings began to dampen enthusiasm.

Many people of all ages still praise the advantages of working remotely, saying the benefits far outweigh any drawbacks. Working from home can:

• Make work schedules more flexible
• Ditch soul-sucking car commutes
• Save money on parking and gas
• Enable people to work later in life

The down sides may be less obvious, but just as real. Working remotely can also:

• Chain people to a chair in front of an electronic screen for long hours
• Raise the health risks for conditions connected to sedentary habits
• Rob people of the chance to brainstorm in person over coffee
• Shrivel the social connections that buffered their isolation and loneliness

The new realities of friendship

“A lot of times, loneliness sneaks up on people,” said Jeffrey Hall, Ph.D., professor of communication studies at the University of Kansas who does studies on friendship. “It feels terrible. It’s not a healthy state to be.”

Studies done before the pandemic have found that loneliness is linked to a higher risk of heart disease and stroke, dementia, high cholesterol, diabetes and other health problems.

One 2023 study also found older workers reported more pain in their muscles and joints when they were required to work more days from home than they wanted. These workers also said they felt they lost a sense of workplace community.

Hall is conducting studies of how people make — and keep — friends. One of his findings is that, among all the places where people said they met friends, meeting at work was second (16%) only to meeting at school (20%).

Over time, as people aged, work replaced school as their primary source of friendship, Hall found. By the time people were 51 or older, they were twice as likely to say they had met one of their friends from work (44%) than people under 30 (21%).

Hall cited multiple ways that people get social support from working together in person: Workplace friends can be mentors, advocates and confidants. But to make friends at work, people have to go in person and stay there.

“It’s hard to make friends remotely,” he said.

Vaughan, who is in her 50s, misses the workplace pals she had in the years before going remote. At her ad agency, everyone worked hard — and hung out together later. “We’d go to lunch together,” she said. “I had young kids working for me, and I’d take them to happy hour.”

All that’s gone. As the years passed and her jobs changed from in-person to hybrid to full-time WFH, the workplace has shrunk to her home office.

“I just don’t know that I ever anticipated being this lonely or isolated in my life,” she said.

Working remotely has shut down some of her options for making friends. “You’re not going to have the types of conversations that lead to closeness,” Vaughan said.

Zoom meetings don’t do much to help. “There’s no entry point to that small talk in remote work,” Vaughan said. “There’s no time before and after the meeting.”

The cost of losing that small talk is not only fewer friendships but also fewer chance conversations that fuel teamwork and new ideas.

“Small talk leads to big talk,” Vaughan said. “The more transactional we become in these meetings, the more that disappears.”

A work-life imbalance

One advantage of remote working — flexible schedules — can also pose a risk. A 2023 study found that three out of four older remote workers struggled with the blurred boundaries between work and life. And they didn’t like it.

After their WFH mandates ended, the study found, 60 percent of them decided to return to the office full-time. They preferred the structure and separation of work from home that an office environment provided.

Yet many work-from-homers have not returned: 20.5% of the San Francisco metro workplace worked remotely in 2023, well above the national rate of 13.8%, according to a report cited by the Association of Bay Area Governments.

For them and others, the impacts of WFH linger.

The loneliness linked to remote working is found in other countries around the world, not just the United States. For example, the Chinese travel company Ctrip told researchers only half of its workers wanted to work from home when offered the option.

“People do not want to talk about it. They feel it’s shameful that you’re lonely.”

Nicholas Bloom, economist at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research

Managers wondered why. “The answer is social company,” said Nicholas Bloom, an economist who studies remote work policies at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.

Bloom followed the WFH program at Ctrip. The company’s pilot test found WFH increased productivity in its employees. Managers thought the pilot program was so successful they offered WFH to all their employees.

Only half agreed to do it. Of those, after nine months, half asked to return to the office.

“They reported feeling isolated, lonely and depressed at home,” Bloom said. “So, I fear an extended period of working from home will not only kill office productivity but is building a mental health crisis.”

Even if some people feel lonely from working remotely, few are willing to talk about it. During the pandemic years, many changed jobs and still feel insecure about revealing anything that hurts their future work prospects.

“People do not want to talk about it,” Vaughan said. “They feel it’s shameful that you’re lonely,” Vaughan said.

Nationally, the number of people working remotely is still more than double what it was in 2019 before the pandemic, Hall said. As a result of that and other factors, “People are spending less time being social.”

That’s not to say remote working is all bad for older workers. Studies have found a mixed bag of benefits and challenges that differ depending on the person and the job they hold.

All this adds up to a complex and nuanced picture of how remote working changes life for people as they age. And that has led to a surge in expert advice on how to manage this.

Solutions range from changing personal work habits at home to wrangling agreements with a boss to pay for travel costs to attend in-person meetings. Some even propose getting a robot dog for company at home.

Ironically, some psychologists and employment experts are prescribing more video chats for people to reduce the risk of loneliness. A 2024 study published in the Journal of Occupational Health suggested that available apps like SquadPal, a “social remote work messaging app for co-workers,” could provide a way to connect and feel less isolated.

Isn’t that a lot like the video meetings that contribute to the lack of connections some people feel from remote working?

“‘Better than nothing’ is something we have to keep in mind,” Hall said.

Donna Alvarado is a Bay Area-based health and science writer.

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